Deadbeat Science

The discovery of an earth-like planet 21 light-years away, and the resultant fuss about the probability of extra-terrestrial life has prompted this deliberation.

Space travel is impossible.
Life has spent all of its time becoming ever more perfectly adapted to Earth. Humankind, as the pinnacle of that development, is highly specialised and terra-centric. However much fun it is to imagine otherwise (and Your Intrepid Reporter has an extensive sci-fi collection) we are well and truly stuck here.

581c is the nearest and most hospitable planet we have discovered, having a temperature range similar to Earth's and the possibility of an atmosphere and water.

However, we can't go there. Well, we could send a rocket, but it would take longer than a lifetime to get there. Even if it becomes possible to cryogenically suspend animation for long enough, we don't have the faintest idea how to make machines that last as long as they would need to. If we made a space-voyaging eco-bubble that could self-sustain and repair for that long, by the time it got there the space travellers inside would have evolved into a different species entirely, adapted to living on an eco-bubble, and with very little in common with Homo Sapiens.
Warping space-time is theoretically possible, but the energy required is (I believe) best measured in Solar outputs rather than puny terrawatts.

Secondly, even if we could go there we wouldn't want to.
With 1.6 times earth gravity, 581c would kill us outright (our hearts simply aren't designed to pump blood that is so dense). Obviously, I would last longer than most, having developed a 'mostly prone' approach to life, but any of the more active, astronaut types would simply die. If it turns out there is an atmosphere, it would almost certainly be poisonous to us (our own atmosphere becomes deadly at pressures not very different to normal. Ask any diver or mountaineer.)

But we could send life itself. When we have completely decoded the human genome (which is still some decades in the future) we will be able to strip away all of the coding which tailors life to earth - all that stuff about how to be a blue-green algae (dependent on the right sort of sunlight) or grow a skeleton (dependent on the right sort of gravity) etc. We could pare the dna back to the very basic kernel of life - which would go something like 'Should there happen to be some nutrients handy, this is how you make amino acids. Sort the rest out yourself.'
This extremely small speck of dna could be sealed inside a chitin jacket, and would be effectively inert - able to withstand the hard vacuum and near-absolute-zero temperature of space. We could make these viruses in trillions, pack them in a probe and send them off to have adventures in deep space. At some point the probe would explode and scatter the seed of life. When/if any of them drifted down onto an hospitable planet, life would begin, and adapt itself perfectly to its new environment.

Which brings us to the Deadbeat Insight. When we have completed our study of the terrestrial genome, when we have stripped the dna code back to the very basic kernel of life, do you know what we will find? A return address, that's what - a cosmic product registration form!

Cheers!

Deadbeat